Why top colleges’ professors are giving up and just giving everybody an A

Professors hand out A’s right and left. This is not because it gives their students a leg up in the job market or because our bosses at big universities require it, but because it is just so much safer.

When you give out a bad grade, you get the incessant emails and whining about why Joey’s grade should have been higher. But that’s just the beginning, not the end of Joey’s B. Joey’s parents then demand long explanations for his B, other than simply Joey’s failure to put on an A-level performance.

Next come the accusations. “You’re racist.” “You’re homophobic.” Once a parent accused me of antisemitism, only to back down and accept the lower grade after I pointed out that I’m Jewish.

If the accusations don’t work, next comes the emotional blackmail. “You don’t care about mental health.”

Just pick your poison, and this new generation of students will accuse you of it. Worst of all, the administrators at these universities are so afraid of their own student body that they will throw the professors to the wolves — that is, straight to the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) dean — if there is so much as a whiff of an accusation.

Being a tough or even a fair grader just isn’t worth the hassle or risk anymore, and the students know this.

From there, the cycle only gets worse. Once kids know that professors will cave, they double down. It’s not just B-plus work for an A grade, but now students who barely know the material demand A’s — and get them.

Grade inflation has been in the discussion at America’s top colleges for a long time, but even seasoned veterans were shocked by a recent study showing that nearly 80 percent of all the grades given to undergraduates at Yale University last year were in the A range.

The average undergraduate GPA (grade point average) at Yale has increased from 3.42 to 3.7 in the last 20 years. I think that reasonable people can agree that college students are most certainly not magically getting smarter. Nor is this a simple pandemic-era bump, as GPAs have been rising steadily since 2000.

And this isn’t specific to just Yale, either. Over the last decade, Harvard has gone from giving out about 60 percent A’s to nearly matching Yale’s 80 percent.

When I was an undergraduate at MIT, my fellow pre-meds and I made a point to take advantage of the MIT/Harvard exchange, allowing any student at either school to take any class at either school. We would hop on the number 1 bus and make our way to Harvard to take dreaded organic chemistry. Why? Because at Harvard, it was a guaranteed A.

Suddenly, your MIT-educated doctor doesn’t look so smart, does he?

Soon, companies and (professional) graduate schools will stop caring about grades, or maybe even the pedigree of your school. Soon, an “A” from the University of Podunk that doesn’t inflate grades will be worth far more than an “A” from Harvard.

The kids are the ones hurt most. America’s companies expect graduates with near-4.0 GPAs to be hard workers who can meet deadlines and are generally competent. But that just isn’t a sure bet anymore. 

We started giving out trophies for participation in school sports, and now we are giving out A’s at top colleges — heck, for even less than participation. (“My mental health and social anxiety was too bad to ever attend class.”) The fight to give fair grades is just too much of a pain in the neck, and way too risky, for a mere lone professor to face.

Liberty Vittert is a professor of data science at Washington University in St. Louis and the resident on-air statistician for NewsNation, a sister company of The Hill.